A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism Edited by Matthias Henze (review)

A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism, edited by Matthias Henze, brings together a collection of essays about authors and works stretching in time from the Hebrew Bible itself up until the cusp of rabbinic literature (and, in the final essay, dipping a toe into those waters as well). Usefully, each of the chapters ends with its own bibliography, providing clear aid for study in greater detail.

In the preface, Henze describes his intent in this work as filling a gap, namely, “a systematic introduction to biblical interpretation in the Jewish literature of antiquity” (p. ix). Tellingly, though, he does not say for whom this introduction is intended—undergraduate courses, graduate students, scholars looking for introductions to fields related to but not their own, and so on. He explicitly takes note of the difficulty in selecting and organizing materials for such a work and explains his choice to organize the Companion by works (though a number of chapters, such as the one on Josephus, focus on authors and their multiple works rather than a particular book). These chapters are themselves organized into eight parts: 1) an introduction; 2) Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; 3) Rewritten Bible; 4) Qumran Literature; 5) Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments; 6) Wisdom Literature; 7) Hellenistic Judaism (a curious title given the clear “Hellenistic” influences on so many of the works in the other parts of the book); and 8) a final part titled “Biblical Interpretation in Antiquity,” with only one chapter discussing the relationship between Qumran interpretation and interpretation in rabbinic literature.

The introduction, by James L. Kugel, provides an overview of most of the works to be discussed in greater detail in the remainder of the book. The chapter is clearly aimed at readers with minimal exposure to this literature and provides very brief discussions of these books and authors. He then tries to delineate “four assumptions” that he claims are common to all of these works (pp. 13–14) and tries to demonstrate them through the example of Gen 5:21–24 (pp. 15–21), an enterprise that has only moderate success, since some of these assumptions may be trivial (e.g., “The Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document”) and, more importantly, it is of course impossible to show how all four of these assumptions manifest in all of these authors on this one passage. But one suspects that Kugel’s goal here is less to make an argument about the commonalities of these works and more to produce a construct in which to introduce them, and in this he is fundamentally successful.

The section on Hebrew Bible/Old Testament includes chapters on inner-biblical interpretation by Yair Zakovitch, the Septuagint by Martin Rösel, and the Aramaic targumim by Edward M. Cook. Zakovtich describes a number of “modes of interpretation” that one can see in inner-biblical interpretation and provides examples. Rösel provides a good introduction into Septuagint research (pp. 69–70) and discusses the practical effects of different theories about the Septuagint on contemporary translations (pp. 71–74). Cook usefully begins with an introduction to the very notion of targum and explains why, despite the fact that the genre that he discusses is “most likely not ‘early’” (p. 92), it nonetheless belongs in a companion to interpretation in “early” Judaism. He also provides a useful summary of scholarship on bilingualism in early Judaism (pp. 93–95).

Part 3, on “Rewritten Bible,” comprises three chapters: one on Jubilees by Jacques van Ruiten, one on the Genesis Apocryphon by Moshe J. Bernstein, and Howard Jacobson’s treatment of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum. Van Ruiten chooses to use the retelling of Gen 11:26–31 (the birth of Abram until his emigration from Ur) in Jub. 11:14–25 as a lens through which to discuss the interpretive methods of the work. Bernstein, in addition to explaining and discussing the Genesis Apocryphon, also includes a discussion of its genre, which has...